While reading Pete Wells’s recent review of Tavern on the Green, I laughed out loud at his spot-on description of the renovated building: “woven into the life of the park more fully than in its last incarnation, a wedding-cake palace as imagined by a 6-year-old princess with a high fever.” Tejal Rao, Bloomberg’s new restaurant critic, piqued my interest in the Brooklyn restaurant Take Root much more than did the restaurant’s inclusion on Michelin’s new list. A dish of cucumbers and macadamias, she wrote, “was finished at the table with a pour of macadamia milk. It was rich with olive oil, thickened with bread leftover from last night’s service, but meticulously strained and emulsified until it was lush as cream. Richer and more refined than an almond-based ajo blanco, the Spanish soup that informed it, it was also one of the loveliest things I’ve eaten this year.”
I don’t always agree with the restaurant critics in the Times or elsewhere, but I trust them—in the way that I trust certain critics of film, television, art, or literature—not to predict what I or anyone else will like (how could they possibly know?) but to entertain me; to provide carefully researched historical and cultural context; to make me think. I trust them to write so thoughtfully and distinctively that I don’t have to wonder if they’re biased; rather, I know that they are, and, over time, can learn their biases and balance my own judgments against them. The relationship between critic and reader is exactly that: a relationship, between two people. You can’t have a relationship with stars.
Dommer Mette Blomsterberg i episode 7 af Den store bagedyst:
Man skal mestre at lege.
Åh. Jeg bryder mig ikke om, at hun sammenstiller Mestre og Leg.
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